The Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation has moved to intervene and dismiss a lawsuit filed by Washington Wildlife First against the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission and Department of Fish and Wildlife.
By intervening, the Sportsmen’s Alliance will ensure the voice and interests of Washington hunters are represented throughout the court proceedings, the orgainization said in a news release published Monday by The Outdoor Wire.
Washington law directs the commission and department to conserve the state’s wildlife and maximize recreational hunting opportunities. This is the same “wise use” conservation mandate that has been a pillar of wildlife policy since the Theodore Roosevelt Administration.
To that end, the commission unanimously approved the 2026 Game Management Plan (GMP) in February. The GMP itself does not authorize a single hunt. It sets guiding principles that the department will consider when it proposes hunts to the commission, which has the ultimate authority to authorize hunts. These principles are broad:
- reducing poaching crimes
- maintaining hunter satisfaction
- incorporating new science into management
- increasing comment opportunities
- perpetuating species
- managing the species for a variety of aesthetic interests, including hunting. These are all entirely consistent with wise-use conservation principles codified in Washington law.
But they evidently go too far for extremist groups who petitioned a court to set the GMP aside. They believe the GMP unjustly “maximiz[es] recreational hunting and trapping opportunity for a small number of Washingtonians.”
They call it “an abdication of [the Department’s] responsibilities under the [statutory] Mandate and the Public Trust Doctrine.”
The Sportsmen’s Alliance strongly disagrees.
The public trust doctrine is deeply rooted in our nation’s conservation policies. Sportsmen were its biggest champion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But it is deeply misunderstood by many.
“The public trust doctrine holds that to the extent wildlife is capable of being owned, the states own it in their sovereign capacity, not as personal property, and can regulate the wildlife for the benefit of the people,” said Michael Jean, Litigation Counsel for Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation. “In simple terms, it means that the state needs to balance different public interests in wildlife and pass laws that it believes strikes the appropriate balance. It is not the same as a private trust, where specific property or money is held and managed for the personal, financial interests of individual beneficiaries according to the terms created by the trust.”
This lawsuit, however, seeks to impose private trust obligations on the department and commission when it manages wildlife. That in turn would allow extremist groups to file suits like this whenever they believe the state is not managing wildlife to its liking … such as authorizing any hunt.
The Sportsmen’s Alliance won’t let that happen.
“These baseless lawsuits have been rejected time and time again,” Jean said. “The state has broad discretion to manage wildlife. Unless it is abdicating its management obligations by allowing private parties to manage the wildlife, courts don’t second-guess the state under the public trust doctrine.”
The Sportsmen’s Alliance is fighting against those who are working to bully and crater our heritage and traditions. Join us or donate to the Sportsmen’s Legal Defense Fund to help stand up against the relentless assault on our values and lifestyle by animal extremists and gun control advocates. Present and future generations are depending on your willingness to fight to protect the future of hunting, fishing, and trapping.
